Statement on discrimination and coercion faced by minority groups in citizenship registration process
နိဳင္ငံသား မွတ္ပုံတင္ျပဳလုပ္ရာတြင္ လူနည္းစုမ်ားအား ခြဲျခားဆက္ဆံၿပီး ဖိအားေပးမႈမ်ားအေပၚ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္
1. For many decades, members of the minority Islamic and Hindu religious communities and those who belong to Rohingya, Kaman, and Christian Lisu minority ethnic groups in Myanmar have faced arbitrary delays and hardships in applying for citizenship documents and identification cards.
၁။ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတြင္ လူနည္းစုဘာသာ၀င္မ်ားျဖစ္သည့္ အစၥလာမ္ဘာသာ၀င္မ်ား၊ ဟိႏၵိဴဘာသာ၀င္မ်ား၊ လူနည္းစု မ်ိဳးႏြယ္မ်ားျဖစ္သည့္ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာလူမ်ိဳး၊ လီဆူးလူမ်ိဳးႏွင့္ ကမန္လူမ်ိဳးတုိ႔မွာ ႏိုင္ငံသား စိစစ္ေရး ကတ္ျပား ေလွ်ာက္ထားရာတြင္ အခက္အခဲအၾကပ္အတည္းမ်ားႏွင့္ ရင္ဆိုင္လာ ရသည္မွာ ဆယ္စုႏွစ္မ်ားစြာရွိၿပီ ျဖစ္သည္။
Special Rapporteur Report Highlights Need for Accountability
London, UK – The Burma Human Rights Network (BHRN) welcomes the report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Burma and the attention paid to limitations on citizenship rights for Muslims—an issue that BHRN has documented extensively.
BHRN particularly supports Yanghee Lee’s calls on the Burmese government to “cease arbitrary and discriminatory denial or restriction of citizenship rights and documentation to members of minority religions or ethnicities” and her demands that the long-abused 1982 Citizenship Law be amended or replaced.
Burma Must Allow Aid Access for All Areas of Rakhine State
London, UK -- Burma Human Rights Network reiterates its calls on the Burmese Government to allow unhindered and complete access for NGOs in northern Rakhine State. Since the military campaign against the Rohingya began on August 25th, 2017, residents have complained of widespread shortages of food and medical aid in Buthidaung, Rathedaung and Maungdaw Townships. While some aid slowly trickled in during the past year, several areas have reported ongoing shortages or no access to aid at all. With the recent conflict between the Arakan Army and Burmese Security forces, aid has been further pushed out leaving the Rohingya and many ethnic Rakhine in an even worse position.
Rohingya Villages in Desperate Situation as New Conflict Continues
London, UK -- Rohingya Villagers in Northern Rakhine State have informed BHRN of food and medical shortages as the conflict intensifies in the region between Burmese security forces and the ethnic Rakhine armed group, the Arakan Army (AA). While the International Committee of the Red Cross has been able to help several Rakhine villagers displaced by the conflict, Rohingya say restrictions imposed by the military have left them unable to receive aid. Some Rohingya villagers that spoke to BHRN have said that they haven’t been able to get aid since August 2017. Recently, Burma military has declared a unilateral ceasefire with most of the country’s many armed groups, they have excluded the Arakan Army from it and focused on isolating and targeting the Rakhine and Rohingya communities since.
Burma Doubles Down on Repressive Policies Against Journalists
London, UK -- The Yangon Region High Court has rejected an appeal by two incarcerated Reuters journalists, Thet Oo Maung (a.k.a Wa Lone) and Kyaw Soe Oo, and upheld the original seven years prison sentence passed on them by the Yangon Northern District Court. The pair were arrested on 12 December 2017 and they were sentenced on 3 September last year. The journalists were arrested after their work exposed a massacre of Rohingya Muslims in Inn Din Village, which the military was then forced to admit occurred.
“These men have been imprisoned to intimidate the free press in Burma and punish those who expose the military. They should be celebrated for their work, but instead, they continue to suffer in prison unjustly for it. Burma has clearly shown the world that it will not stand for free speech if it is against their own interest,” said BHRN’s Executive Director, Kyaw Win.
